Using ubuntu's built in yes command you can force it to answer yes to a particular command, so I edited the start.sh script and forced it to answer yes to anything with prompts, would be great for this to be added to the official scripts if possible!
then npm install again:
$ npm install
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: Please upgrade to 2.2.19 or higher
npm WARN deprecated wrench@1.5.9: wrench.js is deprecated! You should check out fs-extra (https://github.com/jprichardson/node-fs-extra) for any operations you were using wrench for. Thanks for all the usage over the years.
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: graceful-fs v3.0.0 and before will fail on node releases >= v7.0. Please update to graceful-fs@^4.0.0 as soon as possible. Use 'npm ls graceful-fs' to find it in the tree. [email protected] node_modules/require_optional/node_modules/semver -> node_modules/semver [email protected] /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/NodeBB
though still have warning, but installed succeed. Thanks very much! I will go for next steps.